Kenro Kusumi

Kenro Kusumi is dean of natural sciences and professor of life sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (The College) at Arizona State University. He received his AB from Harvard College in Biochemical Sciences and his PhD in Biology from MIT. He carried out postdoctoral training as a Hitchings-Elion Fellow of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. Kusumi was previously faculty at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where he served as director of pediatric orthopaedic research. At ASU, he has served in a number of roles including as director of the School of Life Sciences and associate dean in The College. Kusumi helped to launch the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix in 2006, and he is adjunct faculty at the Translational Genomics Research Institute. Kusumi is committed to advancing inclusive excellence in higher education and research, including serving as mentor and faculty advisor in university and national LGBTQ organizations.

Kusumi’s research uses the power of genome biology to help conserve and study the functional adaptations of reptiles. Among the reptiles, more than half of the living turtle species are threatened with extinction, and Kusumi has sequenced the genomes of the threatened Mojave desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii), Sonoran desert tortoise (G. morafkai) and Texas tortoise (G. berlandieri) as tools for conservation efforts. The anole lizards have been described as the “Darwin’s finches” of reptiles, and Kusumi has led genome-scale analyses of accelerated evolution associated with their functional adaptations. His group has also uncovered sets of genes that are critical in the ability of anole lizards to adapt and regenerate parts of their bodies.